The Postmodern Condition and the Challenge of Rethinking the Foundations of Public Policy and Administration: A Critical Inquiry

Summary

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It has been already 10 years since Charles Fox and Hugh Miller published their important and polemic book, Postmodern Public Administration. It is a book that came at a propitious moment when many scholars were looking for a new framework to redirect both public administration and public policy. Fox and Miller's theoretical appropriation of postmodernism -- with all the usual disclaimers -- eventually elapses in a curious, although not surprising, dissociation of power from any pretense concerning the role of capital, social relations, or the political economy in modern society. Fox and Miller were merely trying to provide a discourse that has been sadly eclipsed by glib, insincere, attention-grabbing symbolic imaginary. One can applaud the daunting challenge they were attempting to resolve: to seek a new framework that can withstand the postmodern condition, on the other hand, and can claim congruence with democratic ideals on the other.

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Extract

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The Postmodern Condition and the Challenge of Rethinking the Foundations of Public Policy and Administration: A Critical Inquiry

Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy;

every opinion is also a hide-out;

every word is also a mask.

Friedrich Nietzche

The human spirit would like to change position

but since nothing urges it forward nor leads it,

the spirit oscillates around itself and does not

move.

Tocqueville

I.

It is still hard to believe that it has been already 10 years since Charles Fox and Hugh Miller published their important and polemic book, Postmodern Public Administration. It is a book, I believe, that came at a propitious moment when many scholars were looking for a new (and innovative) framework to redirect both public administration and public policy. In fact, in the preface to their book, they put it succinctly about their intellectual motivations in writing this rather hortatory scholarly work:

We seek to redirect thinking about public policy and administration in light of the postmodern condition. We will hold that this cond...

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